Hugh Faulkner moved into his flat in Abbey Mill in Tewkesbury only a week ago. On Tuesday, he was having to don waders and pick his way through waist-deep water to get to and from his front door.

But was he upset? Not at all. "It's a mild inconvenience, nothing more than that," he said. "There are people around the country who are much worse off than us."

Another resident of the converted 18th century mill, John Bonham, arrived back from the shops in waders. A business consultant, he was a little concerned that he has missed a couple of days of work as the floodwaters rose.

"That has been a pain, but it's what you get when you live in Tewkesbury. It's the nature of the place." He plunged into the murky brown water, clinging to a rope strung across a swift-flowing section of the floodwater.

Jim Chapman also has a flat in Abbey Mill, but he is spending the week in a hotel in the town. "When it goes above welly boot level I give it up and go elsewhere," he said.

Chapman reckoned the waters have risen around the mill four times this year. "But it always floods here, it's no big deal really. That's why most of the town is built on slightly higher ground. People get on with it."

Tewkesbury attracts headlines during floods because of the spectacular aerial shots, when the magnificent abbey is surrounded by acres of water.

In July 2007 about 1,800 homes were flooded. The town was briefly cut off and water supplies to 350,000 homes in Gloucestershire were hit when the Mythe treatment plant was inundated.

This autumn's flooding, affecting perhaps a dozen homes in and round the town, is nothing compared to that. But it is nevertheless a good time to reflect on the trials, tribulations and frustrations of living in a flood zone.

Anthony Rhodes, the managing director of Rhodes Real Estate on Church Street, admitted that selling houses and flats had been a challenge since 2007. "But it's not just because of the floods; we have had an economic crisis to contend with."

Rhodes said few customers turned up and asked for a riverside property.

"You don't hear that very often and the first question everyone asks when viewing a property is: 'Does it flood?'"

He has a flat in Abbey Mill on his books a the moment – a three-bedroom penthouse for £265,000. In 2007, a couple who were climbing fans lived there, and they set up a zip wire to get from the top floor to dry land. "People around here are resilient," he said.

Along at Coversure Insurance Services, the franchisee Steve Barker is watching Sky News's coverage of the floods. "The problem is that the media makes it look as if Tewkesbury is underwater. It's not," he said.

It was possible for people to still get home insurance, he said, but every time the town features on the news it makes the phone calls to under-writers that bit more difficult.

Since 2007, Severn Trent has spent millions improving defences at the Mythe treament works, which have worked. But no huge flood defence system has been built to protect Tewkesbury itself. The position of the town, at the confluence of the Rivers Severn and Avon, would make any major engineering scheme vastly expensive and probably very unsightly.

Vernon Smith, a Conservative member of Gloucestershire county council, dismissed the EA as a "quango with no teeth and no idea". "It is a body set up by central government to say 'no'. The sooner it's disbanded and replaced by a national rivers authority with proper powers the better."

Smith, who was flooded in 2007 ("even though I don't live anywhere near a river") claimed that in the past five years the agency had done little more in the area than set up alerts and warning systems. "They can tell us that we're going to be flooded, they haven't done anything to actually protect homes."

He is dismissive of the Environment Agency's refrain this week that its defences have protected 25,000 homes across England and Wales, 1,450 of those in Gloucestershire. "That doesn't sound like many to me."

Others complain that developers have still been allowed to build on the flood plain, despite the inundations of 2007. Pinned to the wall of the town hall was a letter to planners from Dave Witts, the secretary of the Severn and Avon Valley combined flood group, which claims that young would-be owners struggle to get insurance for homes in flood-prone areas. "How can you boost the economy through building houses when we build them in the wrong place and buyers cannot get mortgages because they cannot get insurance?" he asks.

As night fell, John Lucas, a retired maths teacher, strolled down to Abbey Mill to take a look at the floods and chat with his friend, Adam Dance, who runs a marketing company from a converted abbey storage shed on the riverbank (the monks cut a canal from the Avon to the shed).

Lucas dismissed the floods. "Oh, we must have had a little bit of rain," he said as he gazed out at the huge expanse of water. "This is nothing compared to 2007."

Dance, who was flooded five years ago, said he was sorry for those going through the soggy misery he endured then. "It's not fun. But you have to get on with it. You get dry, get sorted, start again."

With floods expected to become ever more common, it is the sort of philosophy that communities across the UK may have to start adopting.